The GQA: Guy Pearce

The actor who made Memento so memorable gets the hell beaten out of him in Lockout and lives to tell the tale

If shooting violent criminals off into outer space sounds like a great idea, Lockout is here to disabuse you of that notion. The sci-fi action film stars Guy Pearce as a wisecracking former fed in big trouble with the government; naturally, his only way out is to head to an experimental space prison to save the President’s daughter. Emilie Warnock (Maggie Grace) has flown out to the prison, called MS One, to investigate the ethics of the project. She soon finds out the hard way that it does, in fact, make inmates crazier and more violent than before.

It’s a long way from Mildred Pierce, The King’s Speech, or Animal Kingdom for Pearce, who spends the first few minutes of Lockout being punched in the face. Back on Earth, the bespectacled and bare-footed Pearce is essentially the opposite of Snow or the slick businessman he portrays in Ridley Scott’s highly anticipated Prometheus. We sat down to chat about surprising injuries, punching his costar in the face, and an imagined Prometheus secret hotline.

GQ: You had a lot of intense stunts in Lockout—you really get the crap beaten out of you.

Guy Pearce: I injured myself a couple of times on the film and funnily enough, [during] that big chase sequence at the beginning where I end up running through the train station, I pulled a muscle in my leg, the inside of my thigh, and that gave me a bit of grief for, like, a week. It was one of those inconsequential things where I just slipped slightly the wrong way. Obviously in the fight scenes where you’re getting beaten up, you’re not really getting beaten up, as people know, so I didn’t hurt myself in any of that, but any of the injuries that I sustained were usually doing simpler, as I say, inconsequential things.

I did have to fire a gun when I was going through a narrow passageway with Maggie, and the shell casing flew out and went down the back of my shirt and burnt a shell casing shape into my back, so that was an interesting dilemma. Blistered into a shape of a shell casing, because I couldn’t get the shirt off in time, you know, because I was loaded up with buckles and guns and things.

GQ: I would have thought maybe the wire work or something would have been a problem.

Guy Pearce: The wire work was painful and obviously got more and more painful the more hours you were hanging up there, so that became awkward and uncomfortable, and you really lose your sense of humor, but you’re not really injured as such. You do get a bit bruised from it, and then if you’ve got to go back and do more the next day, that’s a bit uncomfortable.

GQ: Obviously, it’s fake, but how do you psyche yourself up to punch Maggie Grace in the face?

Guy Pearce: Oh, she’s just a bitch. There’s no psyching up at all. Just let me at her, I was saying. Couldn’t not punch her five times, you know?

No, obviously I was a bit nervous about that. If you’re going to get a punch wrong and hit somebody, you don’t want it to be a girl, and you don’t want it to be somebody as lovely and delicate as Maggie. So, yeah, a little bit nervous about that, but I’m generally pretty good with that stuff. But still, it’s nerve-wracking. ’Cause you want to punch and make it look real and hit hard, but of course you stop about there [gestures with fist] so if you miss and you’re hitting hard, you’re really going to hurt somebody. She punched me, though.

GQ: She did. She got one in on you.

Guy Pearce: No, for real. She punched me. She meant to hit me, and she actually hit me, but hey, I was all kind of pumped up and adrenalized and, you know, hurting myself every week somehow or other, so a punch from Maggie wasn’t too big a deal. I think she just clipped my chin, from memory.

GQ: The movie is kind of funny and there are a lot of one-liners, but there’s an uncomfortable undercurrent of sexism, especially this unspoken threat of rape towards her that is really disturbing.

Guy Pearce: Absolutely. That’s the thing about the film. There’s a couple of themes and a couple of ideas and plot points that are heavy in the film, and even to start the film off with someone wrongly accused of murdering their friend, and also, this idea of a prison in outer space with all of the prisoners asleep. So there are some things in there—this film could have gone in another direction, I suppose, and been treated as a heavier sort of drama, but ultimately it wasn’t what the filmmakers were wanting to make. They wanted to get back to those kind of action-oriented leading men who have that sort of cynical view of the world, who are able to deliver a one-liner not just for the sake of the movie but because they themselves are burying some heavy real emotions or whatever.

Even though the film lives in this slightly heightened entertainment arena... there are some heavy elements. And I think also the performance by Joe Gilgun, who plays our sort of crazy major sort of bad guy, you know, he’s a pretty scary dude. He’s not someone you just treat lightly, so it’s interesting. I’m hoping that its sense of reality within this heightened futuristic world means that it has some life and that it isn’t just treated as just as flippant sort of lighthearted action movie with a few snappy one-liners.

It’s funny, though, with films, because you can incorporate a variety of elements, and sometimes that can work for you and sometimes I think it can work against you. It’s a bit like casting a whole lot of famous people in one movie. You would think that with ten super-famous people in one movie, it’s gonna be ten times more popular or viewed, but on some level, they can cancel each other out... I don’t know much about the action genre, it’s not really something I’ve ventured into much before, but I guess if you make it too real and too heavy and too serious, it’s too confronting and people aren’t going to be entertained by it. So it’s hard to know with this one what people are going to think.

GQ: I’m always interested in people who transform their bodies for films. What are, if any, the mental and physical repercussions of that?

Guy Pearce: Well, I did get a kidney stone last year, so I have a feeling that might have been a result of my intense work on Lockout. It may not have been, it might have been a combination of things in my past, but look, I think whenever you’re building yourself up and whenever you’re changing your diet so dramatically, it can kind of mess with you a bit, and I think the trick for me is to sort of be gradual, if you can be. I couldn’t really be gradual going into it, but I have had experience before with weight training and this, that, and the other, so I knew what I was doing.

But it’s hard to maintain a disciplined routine when you’re shape-shifting, as they say. I don’t seem to have too many emotional repercussions, though, I don’t think. I think I generally survive that stuff okay. We’ll see. [laughs] The effects may not have fully manifested.

GQ: I know that you can’t really talk about it, but do you get daily updates from the studio and everyone about what you can and can’t say about Prometheus?

Guy Pearce: There’s certainly not daily updates, but I’m certainly getting updates which basically just keep saying, "You can’t talk about it yet. You can’t talk about it yet." We’re certainly getting close to being able to talk about it, though, because the film’s obviously being released in June, and we’ll go and do a world tour of publicity for it at the end of May. But they’re keeping a pretty tight wrap on it, and they’re doing things like putting out those viral videos and tempting people like you with forbidden fruit.

Guy Pearce: I didn’t know that they actually showed at a TED conference, and Maggie was there. Maggie was there sitting in the audience, and she said, "All of a sudden, your TED lecture comes on the screen."

GQ: So, do you really feel the weight of the fan scrutiny?

Guy Pearce: Yes. [laughs]

GQ: How old were you when you first saw Alien?

Guy Pearce: I can’t remember, actually, when I first saw it... I must have been ten or something like that [when it came out], so I don’t know if I was allowed to see it then. But I know I’d seen it a number of times, so I’d say I was pretty young when I saw it, though, because we saw a lot of scary stuff when I was a kid.

GQ: It’s interesting because Weyland mentions cyber-humans and stuff. It’s like this whole Ridley Scott world that all the fans are just waiting to delve into. Like Blade Runner and Alien and all that.

Guy Pearce: Absolutely. Throw it all in the mix. I think Ridley has a really fascinating view on science fiction, and he’s obviously one of the forerunners of great science fiction, and I think one who really wants to honor the true representation of science fiction and the true sort of reasons for it existing. I think what he’s done with Prometheus hopefully, and I believe, will kind of blow people away.

GQ: What’s your take on the renaissance of Australian film? Of course, John Hillcoat’s film [Lawless] that you’re in is in Virginia, but there are all these Australian films like Animal Kingdom, Snowtown...

Guy Pearce: Look, I think it’s great. It’s hard to pinpoint why all of a sudden a group of Australian films will be doing well and why they perhaps are better made than some from the past. It’s such a small industry that it only takes one or two good filmmakers at a particular point in time to suddenly tip the balance, and suddenly everyone’s talking about Australian films again, so I’m never really sure. And the thing is, it’s a difficult thing because I feel like I’m never there enough to really keep up with what’s going on in the Australian film industry. I just try and be part of it as much as I can.

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